I picked up this book on a recommendation and was amazed by how good it was. It takes a special kind of skill to write a novel whose protagonist is an 82-year-old woman and make such riveting reading of what’s going on in her life and her thoughts and reactions to them, almost on a day-to-day basis. The woman is Honey Fasinga, the feisty daughter of a notorious mafia don, who has returned to her hometown in New Jersey decades after she left her mobster family and reinvented herself in the world of high-end art.

The story is primarily focused on the first year of her return, just before her eighty-third birthday, and on her gradually getting acquainted with and then warming up to the few people who come into her orbit. These include her neighbor, Jocelyn, a young woman who suffers from low self-esteem and has let herself get caught up in a very abusive relationship; a young man, Nathan, who comes to her aide when she is car-jacked and who is strongly attracted to her and she to him despite their significant age difference; and an older woman, Teena, who helps and supports Honey’s grand-nephew, Michael, when he is ostracized by the rest of his family because is he is trans. Despite not wanting to get close to anyone in the twilight years of her life, Honey (whose real name is “Ilaria”) is forced to let her guard down and let these people into her life.

She also gradually comes to terms with her family’s violent past and her own role in it, and she is able to eventually develop, over the course of the next few years, a cordial relationship with the only family members she has left, which is her nephew, his wife, and his son and daughter-in-law. Much to her surprise, she almost instantly falls in love with the new baby boy, Vittorio, that her grand-nephew and his wife have, despite her strong desire to stay away from the family and her traumatic past. The book ends with Honey breathing her last in the hospital while being visited by all the people she has become close to, two of which are especially meaningful to her, the first by Vittorio, now almost six years old, and the second by Michael, who now goes by Mica. Honey has been wanting to reconnect with Michael for years ever since he abruptly dropped by her house shortly after she had moved in, and when he finally comes to visit her, she is able to die peacefully, by “bleeding her entire life into him” when he bends down to kiss her.

What make this book especially poignant is that it is told entirely from Honey’s point of view and captures all of her thoughts, including those that are idiosyncratic as well as those that can only come from the wisdom of old age. Of the latter, while there were so many quote-worthy nuggets throughout the book, here is one that I found especially profound:

She found herself thinking of God. His mean trick of separating us into various forms, so we’d forget that we were all the same—a single piece of fabric stitched into different costumes. It was this persistent delusion that lay at the root of all human strife.

Thoughts like these, and many more, from Honey’s “stream of consciousness” made reading each chapter of this book an amazing read in and of itself. I did not find myself racing through the book eager to see how it would end, as I do with most books I read. Given that Honey is already eighty-two when the book starts, the story was entirely about the journey rather than any possible “outcome.”

It was an experience I treasured and wish I could get more of.

Honey
Author: Victor Lodato
Publisher: ‎ Harper
Publication Date: April 2024

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Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.